JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (2008) 151–170 www.brill.nl/jmp

Book Reviews

Alan Th omas, Value and Context: Th e Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 358 pages, ISBN 0198250177 (hbk.). Hardback/ Paperback: £45.00/-.

Alan Th omas has constructed an impressive in depth defence of moral cognitivism. His starting-point is a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the type of cognitivism developed in diff erent versions by David Wiggins and John McDowell, according to which the objects of our moral perceptions and judgments would not be what they are but for our responses and responsiveness to them, yet those responses are nonetheless to be evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate and are to be explained by reference to the distinctive moral properties of those objects. ‘In a moral explanation essential reference is made both to a subject and to a property to which that subject is attuned: neither can be characterized independently of the other. Th is does not downgrade the claim to objectivity on the part of the property’ (p. 43). By endorsing this claim to objectivity Th omas is committed to rejecting the projectivist and expressivist view developed by Blackburn and others. But expres- sivism is not the only rival view with which Th omas engages. Both Wiggins and McDowell – Th omas notes their disagreements as well as their agreements – take moral understanding and judgment to involve the use of ‘thick’ moral concepts and Th omas remarks that ‘getting a person to conceptualize their situation in the right way, using the right ‘thick’ vocabulary, is an important part of practical deliberation’ (p. 58). But he disagrees with both Wiggins and McDowell about the relationship of reasons and motives to judgments and actions and he does so in part because of the extent of his agreement with Bernard Williams’s account of practical reasoning and motivation. Yet that account is closely related to Williams’s rejection of cognitivism. So a problem confronting Th omas is that of how to draw upon the philosophical resources provided by Williams, while resisting Williams’s non-objectivism. And this engagement with Williams’s work makes Th omas’s book of the highest interest. Williams has often been misunderstood. And Th omas takes care to correct mis- understandings and to disentangle various threads in Williams’s thought. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) Williams argued that the kind of account of moral knowledge defended by Wiggins and McDowell is per- suasive only so long as it is taken to be an account of knowledge claims making use of ‘thick’ concepts within some particular social world, from the standpoint of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI 10.1163/174552408X314240 152 Book Reviews / Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (2008) 151–170 the inhabitants of that world, but that such claims cannot survive critical refl ection from an impersonal perspective external to that world (pp. 2-3 and 149-50). Th omas argues against Williams for the possibility of an agent’s refl ectively adopt- ing an objective and impartial perspective on her or his own reasons, while also acknowledging the relativity of those reasons to that agent’s particular motivational set, including that agent’s present evaluative commitments. Refl ection from such a perspective might issue in the endorsement of some presently accepted motivations and the deletion of others (pp. 69-86). Th omas thus takes himself to be able to assent to Williams’s internalism with respect to practical reasoning, while also insisting that agents whose knowledge claims are of the kind defended by Wiggins and McDowell are not precluded from engaging in critical refl ection, refl ection that plays a key part in justifying those claims. Although no contemporary refl ec- tive agent could have the properties of Aristotle’s phronimos – on this Th omas agrees with Williams and disagrees with McDowell – less than ideally rational agents are justifi ed in some of their claims to moral knowledge. But what then do we mean when we ascribe knowledge of truths to such agents? Th omas follows Crispin Wright in taking a minimalist view of truth and of the class of truth-apt sentences, while rejecting Wright’s antirealism. He accepts Wright’s characterization of moral truth as ‘durable justifi ability in the light of the standards that discipline ordinary moral thinking’ (‘Truth in Ethics’, Ratio 8.3 (December 1995): 209-226, here 210; quoted by Th omas, p. 30). And everything therefore turns for Th omas on how those standards are to be characterized. What he advances is a contextualist account of moral justifi cation, contrasting it with coherentist appeals to the procedures of refl ective equilibrium. Th omas defends contextualism with respect to all knowledge claims, arguing that it alone provides an adequate response to scepticism. He puts his own specifi cally moral contextualism to work in giving accounts of moral error and most interestingly of how to identify and to diagnose moral beliefs informed and distorted by hitherto unrecognized ideological commitments. Th is is a book that deserves many readers, but is not always easy to read. Th omas seems anxious to defend his views against any and every possible objection and to draw upon any and every possible means of support and so he continually turns aside from the main thread of his argument to evaluate this or that set of critical or supportive considerations. Th e sheer number of philosophers whose work he discusses or to whom he alludes is remarkable: it includes, over and above those already named, John Mackie, Christine Korsgaard, Gilbert Harman, Alan Gibbard, Th omas Nagel, Mark Timmons, Michael Williams, Hilary Putnam, Robert Audi, Barry Stroud, Donald Davidson, Charles Taylor, myself, and quite a number of others. His fi nal chapter, in which he develops a contextualist defence of a version of republican liberalism, adds to this list. Th omas’s overall line of argument is vulnerable to criticism of at least two kinds. Th ere are fi rst of all criticisms concerning the detail of particular arguments. I give